Marie Wilson

            On Tuesday morning I dreamed that I encountered a young woman who said something that made her unhappy. I took her in my arms and told her that I loved her even though I was thinking at the same time that I don’t believe in love but sometimes it seems it’s the only appropriate word to use because it means so much to other people. 

            I memorized the third verse of “Dispatch box” by Serge Gainsbourg. It was a real struggle to nail it down and I only got it in the last minute that I’d allowed myself for the effort. That’s half the song. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the second of two sessions. 

            I weighed 87.6 kilos before breakfast. 

            I finished transcribing my handwritten notes on national forgetting and started turning them into this week’s critical summary. 

            I weighed 87.5 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and stopped at Freshco on the way back. I bought a bag of potatoes and five bags of red grapes. 

            I weighed 86.5 kilos at 17:45. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:50. 

            I worked on this week’s critical summary and here’s what I have so far:

            Memory as Forgetting In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, the memory of both the Briton and Saxon communities is fogged by the breath of a dragon. They forget many things but mostly they forget the war that divided them and the genocide that was inflicted on the Saxon people by the Britons. We learn that this enchantment of the dragon’s breath was instigated deliberately by Merlin as a way of maintaining peace. If no one remembers hating or being hated they stop fighting. The memories are still there and surface in dreamlike fragments from time to time but they are more often buried by the spell of forgetting. 

            In “Monuments, Unreal Spaces and National Forgetting,” Yugin Teo suggests that some personal and public forgetting is a good thing but when it is forced on a mass scale it can cause serious side effects, such as interfering with the natural healing process of national mourning. 

            The dragon is a symbol of raw, wild violence, and war. It is ironic that a dragon would be the instrument for the enforcement of the mass forgetting of violence. But an analogy can be drawn between the dragon of The Buried Giant and other forms of mass forgetting that continue into modern times. For example, Remembrance Day is an annual event that commemorates the combatants who fought in the service of Commonwealth nations in conflicts we have been involved in since World War I. This collective of living and dead warriors can be compared with Querig the dragon in The Buried Giant and the periodic nature of staging an annual event of remembrance can be analogized with her exhalation. The annual breath of Remembrance Day is ironically also a day of forgetting. We remember the warriors who fell during World War II but forget that for every fallen warrior there were two non-combatants who lost their lives at the hands of those warriors. 

            When we remember our side’s victory over German fascism in the second world war we forget that some of the soldiers being memorialized participated in the rape of hundreds of thousands of German women as they advanced into Germany. We forget also that fascism was not really defeated but rather repressed so that it was driven underground. What happened to all of the faithful fascists who were defeated in the war? Did they change their minds about a political ideology for which they had previously been willing to risk their lives? No, they simply had no more Nazi leadership to provide support and amplification for their beliefs.

            I had oven fries with gravy and three pork ribs while watching season 1, episode 22 of Burke’s Law. 

            A powerful movie agent named Marty Kelso tumbles down the stairs dead to the feet of his butler with a letter opener in his throat. The butler-cook-chauffeur-masseuse is a former boxer named Kid McCoy who has served Kelso for fifteen years. He says Kelso just married wife number four, Mia Bandini the Italian film star. That night there had been a party with just Kelso, Mia and his three ex-wives. After the party all the wives left, including Mia. She comes home while Burke is there and is not upset about her new husband’s death. Burke talks with her in her bedroom. She says she went out to rehearse a scene for her new movie with the director. The director is George Hogarth and Burke goes to see him on set the next day. He was briefly married to Mia but long before she married Kelso. Burke learns from the lab that the only prints on the letter opener are those of Kelso. Burke goes to see wife number three, Susan Shaw. He also talks with Susan’s current husband Frank Jorek, who hated Kelso. Susan says Kelso made her a star and then married her. She says none of his wives killed him because he had a way with women. The lab discovers that in addition to the letter opener Kelso was poisoned. Burke goes to see Kelso’s first wife Chuchi Smith. She admits to be such a bad actor that even Kelso couldn’t help her. She says she couldn’t have killed him because she’s the only wife that stuck him for alimony and with him dead the cheques will stop. Tim finds out that Chuchi is the beneficiary of Kelso’s insurance policy. The lab finds Kelso died of an overdose of sleeping pills. They also find a lot of baking soda in his system. McCoy says Kelso took baking soda all the time. He shows him the can he kept in his bedroom. Burke speculates that Kelso used the letter opener to open the can, took some, put the can back, staggered away while still holding the letter opener and then fell, accidentally stabbing himself. They catch Hogarth going through Kelso’s papers. Hogarth explains that five years ago he got drunk, beat up a stranger and woke up in jail. Kelso got him off and from then on he was Kelso’s slave. Hogarth was looking for the police report that Kelso had held over his head for five years. Burke goes to see wife number two, Steffi Bernard. She says Kelso married her because she was a writer and he thought writers had status. He found out they don’t and so he married another actor. The lab finds the baking soda was laced with sleeping pills. Burke orders another search of the grounds of Kelso’s estate. Burke has dinner at Mia’s apartment. She says Chuchi went upstairs to lie down during the party. Tim says for the killer to know exactly fifteen sleeping pills would kill Kelso they must have done research. Steffi has a big library and so Burke goes back to see her. Steffi has the medical text with the info but says she was writing a screenplay for Susan and so she and Frank came there all the time. Les finds a cufflink outside Kelso’s house. Burke finds the other one. They’re Frank’s cufflinks. Burke confronts Frank and Frank attacks him. Burke knocks him into the lake. Then he confronts Susan with the cufflinks and accuses her of planting them to incriminate Frank. He says one cufflink is a clue but two scream a frame. She says Kelso talked her into a production company partnership but he was robbing her blind. She tried to get rid of Kelso and Frank at the same time. 

            Chuchi was played by Marie Wilson, who started out working as an extra. At 19 she became lovers with the director Nick Grinde and he cast her to co-star in the comedy short My Girl Sally. She played Mary Contrary in Babes in Toyland. She co-starred in Melody for Two, Boy Meets Girl, The Cowboy Quarterback, She’s in the Army, Fabulous Joe, A Girl in Every Port, The Private Wore Skirts, Marry Me Again, Linda Be Good, The Big Noise, Virginia, You Can’t Ration Love, Waterfront, and Broadway Musketeers. She starred in Sweepstakes Winner. She was a big success on stage in Ken Murray’s Blackout stage shows. She starred as My Friend Irma on the radio, in film, and on TV starting in 1949. From then on she was typecast as the original dumb blonde. She has three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.